Paintings for Now

Neo Rauch at the Met.

“Die Flamme” (2007): Rauch’s work conveys a vision of futility as destiny.

Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART/David Zwirner/ARS, New York

Abounding critical and commercial success has earned Neo Rauch a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, of fourteen typically virtuosic and befuddling paintings, all made this year. Rauch may be barely known outside the art world, but fame is increasingly superfluous to the establishment of an artist’s sinecure. Insider buzz and sales to collectors of the right pedigree are what count. An influential teacher as well as painter, Rauch is the champion of a fertile scene in Leipzig—long an arts center—in the former East Germany. (In Germany, unlike here, teaching is a prized role of art stars.) He was born in Leipzig in 1960. When he was a few weeks old, his parents died in a train wreck, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents. He studied under the tottering academic regime of Socialist Realism, which lingers in his work’s frequent suggestions of foul utopias peopled by smooth-browed heroes, laced with Surrealist uncanniness, and given Pop éclat. Aspects of his style bring to mind Goya, Beckmann, Balthus, and Magritte, as well as, in trace amounts, Jörg Immendorff and other West German neo-expressionists who affected him in the nineteen-eighties. He is a homebody, living with his wife and teen-age son in Leipzig, and bicycling six miles each weekday morning to his studio, in an old cotton mill. He teaches two days a week. On weekends, he gardens. His pictures feature structures and interiors familiar from his childhood: in his words, “kitchens, barracks, workshops, and nurseries.” With no prior planning, he starts and develops his complex compositions on canvas. He told an interviewer, “I understand myself to be a director of plays.” The plays, such as they are, emerge in the process.

Rauch has also said that his subjects often derive from his dreams, and that the recurrent character types—sensitive young man, bearded older man, chunky young woman, and proletarian, military, or fire-brigade squad—all represent him. Their behavior stymies interpretation, and even curiosity. It can appear not to interest the artist himself very much. Three men in crimson riding jackets, backstage at a theatre, dominate the big, panoramic “Para.” One sits at a piano, perhaps composing. The second—huge and bending over, it seems, to fit into the picture—peers at the third, who stands next to a woman in blue, seated with a cello, and parts mustard-colored curtains, as if to check the house. A rustic table in the foreground supports indistinct CD cases (a visitor to Rauch’s studio in 2005 noticed piles of up-to-date pop music, such as the White Stripes) and, on an anvil, a little hammer and a small red dragon with yellow and green wings. The red-lettered word “PARA” floats above. In terms of narrative content, the work is maddeningly coy—unless you fancy Jungian woolgathering about archetypes and suchlike—but it is so well designed and painted that, once you have started looking, resistance gives way.

Rauch has titled the entire show “Para.” The curator, Gary Tinterow, the Met’s chief of modern and contemporary art, writes in the catalogue that he believes the artist “hopes to set in motion a string of associations with the prefix: paranormal, parallel, paradox, and so on.” “Paradox” seems wrong, for want of any apparent doxa to contradict, and so does the idea of a response “set in motion.” Rauch’s stories don’t come from or go anywhere, as far as I can tell. Every association—in the painting “Para,” to hunting, music, theatre, and magic—is a cul-de-sac: arriving at it, you must return by the route you took. Rauch’s hermeticism is most daunting when his scenes are most nearly naturalistic. Four figures with crossbows inhabit “Jagdzimmer” (“Hunter’s Room”). One young man lights another’s cigarette; a bearded man gestures strangely; and a woman pokes at a dead bird on a table. Their poses have the charged solemnity of Balthus, without the erotic crackle. Nothing seems to be at issue for them. (The bird is beyond caring.) But masterly areas of the painting, astonishingly varied in style, captivate. Rauch tends to use oils as if they were poster paints, flatly—often scumbling, rather than glazing or blending, to modulate tones and colors. The result is a surreptitious richness. The rhetorical potency of oils—sensuous texture, light-drinking color, infinite suggestiveness—strains at a short, taut leash. The constrictive effect strikes me as perverse, but it is certainly original. It also anchors Rauch’s importance as an artist of and for the historical imbroglio of art today.

Collectors are tumbling over one another to rate contemporary art higher and higher, in a frenzy that feels religious—the market as a medieval cathedral under construction, whose consumption of resources declares the priority of immaterial belief over practical needs. Inflated financially and, through booming institutions, socially, art may never have been more esteemed while meaning less. Rauch’s production of handsome, stony symbols of something both momentous and ungraspable happens, by a chance that resembles fate, to mirror the crisis. A bard of Eastern Europe, rooted in the obsolete future of revolutionary hopes, he deploys a deadpan satirical tone of majestic confidence with no conceivable basis in fact. His attitude is profoundly conservative, though not reactionary, if only because it doesn’t countenance anything to react against. Rauch’s redolences of Socialist Realism are like a dead-virus vaccine: a virulence deprived of its power to sicken and, thereby, forfending sickness. Violence and danger there may be. People are prone to madness. In “Vorort” (“Suburb”), men in a street burn flags of indeterminate nationality. A sinister, old-fashioned aerial bomb lies nearby. But a yellowish cast of sunset light combines with the yellow of flames to invest the scene with the dreaminess of a fairyland comedy. The situation is grave, but not serious. Rauch’s work provides a cultural moment that seeks legitimacy in art with talismans of rhapsodic complacency.

The surprise is that worry-proof conservatism can generate real artistic force. It does so, in Rauch’s art, by finding opportunities, in trumped-up fantasy, for recovering traditional aesthetic capacities of painting. Having nothing to say, he says it ever more marvellously. Tinterow helps us gauge one signal quality by extending the show into a room of the Met’s permanent collection which contains pictures by such stalwarts of painterly expressiveness as Lucian Freud, Alice Neel, Leon Kossoff, and Georg Baselitz. The collegial affinity alerts the eye to almost subliminal wonders of brushwork in Rauch’s stolid mise en scène. He could do anything that those artists do, the comparisons imply, were he not committed to more important tasks, such as, in “Die Fuge” (“The Fugue,” or “The Gap”), reporting the event of a bearded man emerging with a chain from a heaved fissure in the earth, while what appear to be firemen labor obscurely, a man and two women (or half women, merging with each other) levitate next to a brick shed that bears bubble-lettered graffiti, a mountain looms—and that’s far from all. Epic and ridiculous, the tableau wields its felicities with a comical lightness, as of throwaway witticisms. My attention to the picture finally focussed, with pleasure, on a marginal passage of still-life: an unidentifiable animal part in a dish rests on a fish atop a book on a cloth on a table. The detail constitutes a lovely oddball painting in itself.

Come to that, still-life seems to be Rauch’s lurking, fundamental genre. His people are objects. He arranges them. Everything, including snatches of abstract design or facture, feels imported from somewhere and put in place, where it stays. In “Der Nächste Zug” (“The Next Move,” or “The Next Draw”), cigarette smoke, blue-gray on a black ground, doesn’t rise or drift; it locks down into a calligraphic abstraction of a vaguely nineteen-forties, European sort. Not that noticing the stylistic echo profits a viewer anything. The more observant you are of erudite allusions in the show (some male figures display particular airs and dress styles of nineteenth-century German Romanticism), the more acute will be your frustration in trying to make sense of it all. If Rauch’s work is nightmarish, as some critics have asserted, the effect pertains not to its dramas but to their mockery of understanding. They are not mysterious, because mysteries imply solutions. Rather, they convey that we may know plenty but our knowledge is useless. There is a highly contemporary sting in this. Today, we are flooded with accurate information—letting us confidently judge the failures and iniquities of political leaders, for instance—and we naturally feel that such clarity must influence events, but it only amplifies our dismay as the world careers from one readily foreseeable disaster to another. Rauch sets us an example of getting used to it.

Conservatism takes grim, or not so grim, satisfaction in demonstrations of human folly. It has a major pictorial philosopher in Rauch, who calmly implicates himself, and art, in a vision of futility as destiny. “Die Flamme,” which seems quite explicitly a metaphorical self-portrait, presents a riding-jacketed man, in a landscape, striding the length of a long wooden box of painting materials. He carries semaphorelike flags. His legs are lashed to planks that extend upward to form an X. The flame of the title is a pale flare in the sky, over the distant horizon. The image might be read as an allegory of inspiration contingent on an acceptance of grotesque handicaps. Or it might not. But I think I’ve never seen an excellent painting that is so masochistically cheerless, to the point of revelling in a contemplation of impotence. I would like to despise the artist for this, but his visual poetry is too persuasive. Present-day reality is a lot more like one of his pictures than I wish it were. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He is the author of “The Hydrogen Jukebox.”